John Kenneth Galbraith: Trending quotes (page 7)

“Broadly speaking, [Keynesianism means] that the government has a specific responsibility for the behavior of the economy, that it doesn't work on its own autonomous course, but the government, when there's a recession, compensates by employment, by expansion of purchasing power, and in boom times corrects by being a restraining force. But it controls the great flow of demand into the economy, what since Keynesian times has been the flow of aggregate demand. That was the basic idea of Keynes so far as one can put it in a couple of sentences.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Booknotes interview (1994)

Behavior , Idea , Time

“It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 11, Section IV, p. 130

Sea

“The advisers and counselors were not, however, analyzing the danger or even the possibility. They were serving only as the custodians of bad memories.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter IX https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Cause and Consequence, Section V, p 184
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

Memory

“The fact was that American enterprise in the twenties had opened its hospitable arms to an exceptional number of promoters, grafters, swindlers, impostors, and frauds.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter IX https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Cause and Consequence, Section V, p 178
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

Fraud

“The massive reduction in risk that is inherent in the development of the modern corporation has been far from fully appreciated.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 8, Section II, p. 87

“Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

The Sydney Morning Herald (22 May 1982), as cited in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993), edited by Robert Andrews, p. 972

Intelligence , Wealth

“Men meet together for many reasons in the course of business. They need to instruct or persuade each other. They must agree on a course of action. They find thinking in public more productive or less painful than thinking in private. But there are at least as many reasons for meetings to transact no business. Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. They yearn for the prestige which accrues to the man who presides over meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages over which they can preside. Finally, there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter VII https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Aftermath I, Section IV, p 139
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

Men , Pain , Business , Thinking

“Nothing in our time is more interesting than the erstwhile capitalist corporation and the erstwhile Communist firm should, under the imperatives of organization, come together as oligarchies of their own members.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XXXV, Section 2, p. 390

Time

“Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

on Friedman's advising of the Israeli government, "The Private Man and the Public Life; Interview With Galbraith", The Washington Post (26 April 1981)

Fear , Country

“It was not hard to persuade people that the market was sound; as always in such times they asked only that the disturbing voices of doubt be muted and that there be tolerably frequent expressions of confidence.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Source: The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929), Chapter V, The Twilight of Illusion, Section II, p. 70

People , Confidence , Time

“In 1736, Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette printed an apology for its irregular appearence because its printer was "with the Press, labouring for the publick Good, to make Money more plentiful."”

John Kenneth Galbraith

The press was busy printing money.
Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter V, Of Paper, p. 54

Money , Business , Appearance

“Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 5, Section I, p. 47

Idea

“That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplifications of our culture.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XII, Section 1, p. 142

Love , Money , Behavior

“In a community wherepublic services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 18, Section II, p. 203

Communication

“I was studying agriculture, how to produce better chickens, better cattle, better horses — horses in those days — better fruit, better vegetables. This was in the early years of the Great Depression, and the thoughts crossed my mind that there wasn't a hell of a lot of use producing better crops and better livestock if you couldn't sell them, that the real problem of agriculture was not efficiency in production but the problem of whether you could make money after you produced the stuff. So I shifted from the technical side to, first, the study of agricultural economic issues and then on to economics itself.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Booknotes interview (1994)

Money , Hell , Problem , Study

“And after they have started the action will always look, as it did to the frightened men in the Federal Reserve Board in February 1929, like a decision in favor of immediate as against ultimate death. As we have seen, the immediate death not only has the disadvantage of being immediate but of identifying the executioner.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter IX https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Cause and Consequence, Section VII, p 190
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

Death , Men , Decision

“There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XVIII, Section 5, p. 208

Thinking , Singing , Dependency

“The market had reasserted itself as an impersonal force beyond the power of any person to control, and, while this is the way markets are supposed to be, it was horrible.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter VI https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Things Become More Serious, Section II, p 111
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

Way , Personality

“Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 1, p. 27

“Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter X, Section 5, p. 122 (Mr. Galbraith was originally an agricultural economist...)

Study